Archive: 2011

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011. Originally cross-posted at Scientopia.

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I came across this fascinating poster advertising tea at The Coffee Bean in Irvine, CA.  The ad features tea leaves balled up into small tea “pearls” and spilled into a person’s palm (text and analysis below):

Text:

Three minutes to fragrant perfection.

It takes a full day to hand-roll 17 ounces of our Jasmine Dragon Pearl Green Tea.  But in just three minutes you can watch these aromatic pearls unfurl gracefully into one of the world’s most soothing and delicious teas.

This ad suggests that others’ toil should enhance one’s experience of pleasure.  The fact that it takes a significant amount of human labor to “hand-roll” tea leaves into balls — an action that is in no way asserted to change the taste of the tea — is supposed to make the tea more appealing and not less.  We are supposed to enjoy not just the visual, but the fact that others worked hard to produce it for us.  A whole day of their labor for just three minutes of curly goodness.

This is a rather stunning value pervading U.S. culture.  Luxury may be defined not only as pleasure, or as the consumption of the scarce, but as the “unfurling” of others’ hard work.  What could be more luxurious than the casual-and-fleeting enjoyment of the hard-and-long labor of others?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.

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In Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Ori and Rom Brafman discuss a contestant on Qui Veut Gagner des Millions?, the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, who asks the audience for help with the question, “Which of these revolves around the Earth?” His options are the sun, the moon, Venus, and Mars. While it might be surprising that he doesn’t know, more shocking is the result of the audience poll — 56% say the sun:

How can we explain this? The easiest answer, and the video’s title, is that French people appear to be stupid, or were never informed about the Copernican Revolution. But the Brafmans have an explanation based on different cultural attitudes toward reality shows and, ultimately, ideas about fairness.

The general outlines of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? are the same regardless of country. But distinct cultural patterns have emerged in how audiences act when asked for help. In the U.S., contestants can count on the audience’s goodwill; regardless of the question asked, audiences appear to do their best to help contestants out and the Brafmans report that data shows the audience is right over 90% of the time. I must admit it had never occurred to me that audiences would do anything other than try to be helpful. Though I don’t watch game shows now, as a kid I regularly watched The Price Is Right, among others, with my family, and we always inherently rooted for the contestant, cringing if they seemed to make a bad choice and rejoicing if they won big. We truly wanted these complete strangers to win.

But not all national audiences are so cooperative. When the show was introduced in Russia, contestants quickly learned to be wary of asking the audience for help because Russian audiences frequently mislead them, intentionally giving the wrong answer. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the players or the questions they ask for help on.

In France, audiences seem to fall in the middle. They don’t regularly attempt to trick players, as Russian (and according to my googling, Ukrainian) audiences do. But unlike U.S. audiences, they don’t seem willing to help under any circumstances, either. They appear to intentionally give the wrong answer if the contestant asks for help on a question the audience perceives as too easy. If they think the player ought to know the answer they give the wrong response, apparently thinking the contestant deserves to lose if they’re so stupid. In the video you can hear audience laughter when Henri decides to go with the results of the audience poll.

Ori and Rom Brafman suggest this relates to notions of fairness, which have been shown to vary widely by culture. They say that in the U.S., we think it’s fair for people to win large sums of money even if they seem dumb, while in France, there is more concern about whether the individual deserves to win. They consulted historians of Russian society who suggest audience behavior there results from a general mistrust of those who gain sudden wealth. However, they provide no data to directly connect the audience members’ intentional wrong answers to cultural perceptions of fairness more broadly, so I’m somewhat hesitant about this theoretical leap. If you’re an enterprising grad student looking for a dissertation topic, perhaps you can take this project on and get back to me with your results.

But I think this topic is also interesting for the way it highlights the intersection of globalization and local cultures. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, like other reality shows such as the various varieties of Idol, are international franchises (Millionaire is owned by Sony), designed to be easily transferable to and implemented in many countries with the same basic blueprint — simply add local talent and you’ve got a successful TV show. But as the variation in Millionaire shows, differences inevitably creep in as a global product or process is used or interpreted on the local level, sometimes in superficial ways but other times to a degree that significantly alters the original product.

Thanks to Kelly V. for the tip about the book!

It seems obvious that basic cognitive perceptions shouldn’t vary by society.  That is, that our eyes should see, and our brains should process, essentially the same no matter what we call ourselves, what language we speak, or what holidays we observe.  It turns out, however, that even basic cognitions vary across the world.

Most Americans, for example, perceive the two lines in this optical illusion to be of different lengths, with line a shorter than line b.  In fact, they are the same length.

But, as argued by Joseph Henrich and colleagues in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, our susceptibility to this illusion varies by culture.  On average, line a needs to be another fifth longer than line b before the average American undergraduate evaluates the lines to be equal in length.  Most other societies that have been tested on this illusion, however, require substantially less manipulation.  The figure below compares how individuals in different societies perform on this test.  The measures are tricky, and you can read more about them here; what you need to know for now is that the societies on the right are more susceptible to the illusion and the societies on the left less.

Observing that individuals in more developed societies (e.g., Evanston, Illinois) tend to be more vulnerable to the illusion — indeed, that in some societies, such as the San foragers of the Kalahari, it doesn’t qualify as an illusion at all — Henrich and his co-authors argue that exposure to “modern environments” may be the culprit:

…visual exposure during ontogeny to factors such as the “carpentered corners” of modern environments may favor certain optical calibrations and visual habits that create and perpetuate this illusion.  That is, the visual system ontogenetically adapts to the presence of recurrent features in the local visual environment.

Even basic cognition, that is, varies across cultures.

As Henrich et al. argue, this calls into question all of the truisms of psychology based, primarily, on experimental research with Western subjects.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.

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In this 26-minute talk, philosopher Gerald Allan Cohen offers a wonderfully eloquent critique of capitalism. His critique revolves around common defenses. He suggests that even the existence of people who have earned their riches legitimately and through their own wit and work do not justify a system of private property. He contests the idea that we are all better off under capitalism compared to other economic systems, suggesting that capitalism retards the human potential of workers nefariously and by design. And he disagrees with the claim that economic inequality is inevitable. Economic inequality, he contends, will someday be seen as an injustice. Capitalism was an important stage, he concludes, and one that we need to outgrow.

I recommend that everyone take a listen, though I’ll admit it starts off kind of goofy:

Part I:

Part II:

Thanks to Chris Bertam at Crooked Timber for putting these videos up.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Christmas Across Cultures

• Christmas Cultures
• Santa’s Evil Side Kick
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Protestantizing Christmas Gift Giving: The ChristKind
• Politics and the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
• The Pagan Roots of Christianity
• Snegurochka: Santa’s Granddaughter

On Discourse:

• Have a “Gay” Holiday!
• Is Peace Free?
• “Christmas” vs. “Holiday”: The Rematch
• 12 “Mums” Makes the Workload Light

The Institution of Christmas

• Christmas has an Economy

Racializing Christmas

• New York Times Gift Guide for People of Color
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Holiday in the Hood
• The Hazards of Historical Amnesia

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

• Gender, Technology, and Toys ‘R Us
• Gender in Toy Catalogs
• Body Messages in Christmas-Themed Ads
• Gift Giving with Gender Stereotypes
• More Gender Gift Giving and Advertising
• Another Gendered Gift Guide
• And more Gendered Gift Guides
• Or, you could just buy her a clothesline

Sexifiying Christmas

• Sexy Women as Toys
• O-O-Oh Santa! (pictured)

Christmas Marketing

• Support the Troops. Shop Walmart?
• Fun with the 2009 Target Catalog
• Guns for Christmas
• 1930s Ad Touting Razor Technology
• Gap Thinks Girls are Vapid

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Samantha Moore sent in a screenshot of the front page of the website for Aerie, a brand of lingerie marketed to 15-21 year-olds.  I thought it was quite the stunning example of the impossible bodies that young people are offered as the ideal.

Adding more perspective, Samantha writes:

I shopped at American Eagle before I turned 15, and I would say that’s part of the draw — girls like to shop where the older kids do. Though aerie may be officially targeting older teenagers, this bra campaign wipes away the transition from puberty to sex; you know, that time when you bra shop out of necessity and dreadfully weird body change, not sexual enticement.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Fraulion sent in this screenshot from the Amazon.com homepage.  In case you needed help buying gifts, dads like history and politics, moms like to smell nice and look shiny, girlfriends and wives like chick flicks and cute stuff, boyfriends and husbands like classic rock and knowing what time it is, grandpas like to watch documentaries (probably about “the war”), and grandmas just want to look at pictures of their grandchildren.

Last but not least, Rob W. sent in another Amazon.com gift guide that suggests that women want a masculine-looking watch and men want a wine aerator (I don’t know what that is, but wine is woman-y right?).  So… counter-stereotypical push back against the gender machine?  Or a typo?  I’m going with typo.  Funny typo.

More after the jump:

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Time for another round-up of gendered kids’ items!

Will L. noticed something interesting recently at Old Navy. The boys’ section offered two styles of jeans, Skinny and Regular:

But when he looked at the corresponding section in the girls’ clothing, he found not Skinny and Regular, but Skinny and…Super Skinny:

Caro Reusch sent us an example of kids;’ t-shirts with messages about what we value for men and women. She saw the following at a mall in Berlin:

The blue one says “My daddy is stronger than yours,” while the pink announces, “My mommy is prettier than yours.”

Similarly, Lindsey B. saw two themed bibs for sale at Target. The blue bib is a doctor and the pink one is a ballerina:

Shantal Marshall, a postdoc student at UCLA with a Ph.D. in social psych and blogger at Smartie Pops, noticed that Crayola has a new product out, the Crayola Story Studio.  It lets you upload a photo of yourself, have it turned into a cartoon, and then it’s inserted into one of 3 themed templates: Disney Princess, Spiderman, or Cars. You can then print off various versions of coloring books based on those templates. The commercial for the Spiderman version shows a boy excitedly becoming a superhero:

For the Disney Princess version, we see a girl excited to become a princess, then dancing in the background with her very own Prince Charming:

As Shantal said, it’s a bit dispiriting that Crayola’s slogan for these items is “give everything imaginable,” but the pre-existing templates, and their marketing, don’t seem to include an imaginable alternative to the “boys = superheroes” and “girls = princesses” division we see so often in kids’ toys.

Madelyn C. saw a store in Warsaw, Poland, that just goes ahead and makes the gendered division of the toy industry explicit:

Finally, Jessica M. sent in a link to a GOOD post by Christopher Mims about the Toy Industry Association’s 2011 Toy of the Year Awards. There are general categories of toys, such as educational, innovative, and action, but of course also girl and boy categories (also, I personally can’t think of “boy toy of the year” without thinking of Madonna’s outfit in her “Like a Virgin” performance at the first MTV Video Music Awards, but maybe the ’80s are sufficiently behind us that the phrase resonates differently for most people). Anyway, Mims discusses the gendered messages in the commercials for the nominees in the two categories. Among other things, the categorization is rather confusing. Hexbugs are nominated in the boy category, even though commercials for them show girls as well:

Also, Mims points out that the boys’ category “includes a strong undercurrent of Beyond Thunderdome via WWE.” Exhibit A: The commercial for Beyblade Metal Masters, “performance tops” to be used in “strategic battles”:

Playing with tops has gotten super hardcore, I guess. Probably they should look into a sponsorship from an energy drink.